Ice Storm ’98

In 1998, in my neck of the woods in Eastern Ontario (Canada), we experienced 3 days of relentless freezing rain which in turn took down thousands of power lines and poles rendering us all powerless. The small towns in our area took about a week to get reconnected. Out in the country it took a lot longer to get hooked up again. We were out of power for 21 (long) days.
Memories of that time: wood stoves and gathering wood; darkness; candle wax everywhere; the Canadian army coming over every two days to hook up a generator (we didn’t have one) so that we could pump enough well water to last us till their return; people dropping in to see if we were okay; the kindness of strangers; a neighbour who loaned us his pickup truck because our car stopped working (great timing!); no telephone and feeling totally cut off from the rest of the world; listening to the radio and hoping our batteries wouldn’t run out (there was a shortage of batteries locally!); the silence and pitch blackness of the countryside.
Twenty years later, our local museum, The Glengarry Pioneer Museum, decided to have a fundraiser to reflect back to the Ice Storm of ’98.
I was asked to do a cake for auction. I decided to try to emulate that feeling of ice and snow and darkness in the little gingerbread house atop the cake. The white chocolate drip reflects the icicles that were dripping on everything. The candied rosemary is meant to be reminiscent of the heavy ice that had the pines and cedars bent over with the weight of that ice.